UNTIL OUR LAST BREATH
Laurel Corona, Author

July 2, 2008

It’s been a wonderful several weeks doing readings for UNTIL OUR LAST BREATH. I’ve met Jews and non-Jews, people from Vilna and people who aren’t sure where to look for it on a map. I’ve interacted with other professional writers as well as young aspiring ones, with people who’d read the book and people who just like to come listen to authors talk.

I want to single out one person I met who has already made a difference in my thinking about the future of UNTIL OUR LAST BREATH, or at least my future as its author. His name is Wyman Brent, and his vision for a Jewish Library in Vilnius has gotten me very excited and wanting to do all I can to help. I’ve added a new page to this website giving more information about the project, and I plan to write an article about him and the project sometime in the near future.

During the Holocaust, the Nazis tried to destroy the Jewish libraries of Europe and nearly succeeded. The YIVO and Strashun Libraries in Vilna were among their targets. In the Vilna Ghetto a library was one of the first things the imprisoned Jews set up, and it was one of the great sustainers of their spirit.

Since I'm an educator as well as a writer, there’s nothing I value more than books, so I’m feeling very good about the possibilities of using any status I may have as the author of UNTIL OUR LAST BREATH to help this project. What better way for me personally to affirm my belief that education is the key to righting wrongs and improving the world than to help bring a great Jewish library back to Vilnius?

If you are interested in becoming involved, or just want to know more, you’ll find many helpful links on the new "Vilnius Jewish Library Project” page elsewhere on this site.

June 20, 2008

UNTIL OUR LAST BREATH has been out a little over a month now, and I have been very gratified by the response. The book is my contribution to the literature on a subject I feel passionately about, and it mattered to me to do the best possible job I could writing it. It is indeed uplifting to hear feedback from critics, readers, and audiences that I managed to accomplish what I set out to do.

I wanted to write a compelling narrative first of all, and I hoped to do this with a voice that was uniquely mine. Since readers come to the book with varying amounts of background information, I wanted to strike a balance so that those unfamiliar with the history of Vilna’s Jews would have an adequate base to appreciate the story, and those with more extensive background could get a quick review without feeling bogged down reading things they already knew. I wanted to write faithfully to the facts without sacrificing the imagination required to make the settings and characters vibrant and real. I wanted readers to care about both the specific people in the book and the larger population of Jews who lived (and died) with quiet heroism in an incomprehensible time.

I particularly appreciate this comment from Scott Noar, who graciously allowed me to put some photos on my website from his own research trip to Vilna. “I just read Until Our Last Breath. I read it in a day, I couldn't put it down. I know a lot of about the Vilna ghetto story but learned much more from this book. Excellent job, well written.” I was gratified by reviewer Donald Harrison’s review, "Masterful Retelling of Shoah in Vilna," in which he comments that the “fine writing of Laurel Corona, a writer with a straightforward style…for the most part, lets the facts of the Holocaust speak for themselves.” The Jewish Daily Forward comments that the book’s narrative strength lies in my “passionate description of Vilna, Yiddishland’s Baltic jewel and above all, a city where both Jewish traditions and Jewish modernisms flourished. […] A delicate, expressive story surfaces, letting Vilna sink slowly into our memories." Many other reviewer comments can be found on the various pages of this site, and I won’t repeat them here, but it feels good to receive such a positive assessment of my writing from so many prestigious figures in the Jewish community, and critics from top review journals.

To everyone who has looked at my website, come to one of my talks, and/or read the book, THANK YOU, and to those who have taken the time to comment, thank you most of all.

May 13, 2008

Publication Day! Lissa Warren's excellent book, THE SAVVY GUIDE TO BOOK PUBLICITY, says that I should think of today as UNTIL OUR LAST BREATH's debutante ball. I've now seen that there are a lot of important debuts for a book--the day the editor's advance copy arrived and I saw the finished version of UNTIL OUR LAST BREATH for the first time, the date the book shipped to retailers, the release and on-sale dates, and the official publication date--in this case timed to coincide with the sixtieth anniversary of the State of Israel.

Since Books-a-Million and Amazon began shipping orders last week, I suppose in some way the debut happened without me in a remote warehouse or two, when the first copies were packed and mailed to people with the good sense and excellent taste to pre-order. Hope you were among them. The debut really takes place when you sit down to read. And now I wait to hear what you think.

Happy Birthday, Israel!

May 8, 2008

UNTIL OUR LAST BREATH is the culmination of a writing project I began in 2004, when Michael Bart shared his parents' story with me and asked me if I would be interested in writing a book about it.

That book will now be released in less than a week. It's exciting--and nerve wracking--to wait out the last few days, but some time back I made a decision to give my first reading at San Diego City College even before the book came out. It was too close to spring finals to wait, and more important to give the book its first public exposure than to have copies to sign.

It takes so long for a book to come to this point, and since the sale of UNTIL OUR LAST BREATH, my time has been filled with final revisions of one novel and polishing a second for my agent to market. To sit down after almost a year and read UNTIL OUR LAST BREATH again start to finish, prepare remarks about it, and select a few passages to read re-immersed me not just in the subject matter, but in recollections of my struggle to find a way to do justice to the Holocaust and its victims in words. It was a way of looking back at who I was when I wrote the book, remembering where I sat, where I paced, where I got away from it all. Even memories of the research and writing are physically intense enough to give me knots in my stomach as I write this.

The reading at San Diego City College was exhilarating and emotional. The same things that made me cry when I wrote made me struggle to keep my voice as I read--the march to the ghetto, Abba Kovner's exhortation to fight to the last breath, the first successful sabotage missions, Leizer and Zenia's arrival in America. The audience reaction was just what it should be--stunned and shocked, but engaged, and wanting to know more. Exactly how I hope readers of the book will react. Exactly what a Holocaust book should evoke.

Four years ago I debated whether to accept Michael Bart's offer to write this book. I am so glad I did. Since it continues to be a journey for me, from time to time I will share it with you through this newsletter. If you wish to respond, please do so through the link on the discussion page or via the e-mail link found on each page of this site.

Laurel Corona